Maintaining your share portfolio just got a whole lot easier

8th December 2011by Tony Ryburn, Executive Director, Sharesight

Our aim at Sharesight is to make share market investing and maintaining your share portfolio as easy as possible for you.

With that aim in mind we have developed an exciting new feature that will automate the recording of your buy and sell trades into your Sharesight portfolio. This will save you the hassle of having to manually record new trades into your Sharesight portfolio each time you buy and sell.

How does this work?

Sharesight provides you with a unique email address and you instruct your Broker to send a copy of each of your contract notes to this address.

Each time we receive a copy of the contract note from your broker, Sharesight will automatically create a trade in your portfolio. The trade will contain a comment to indicate it was created from a contact note sent via email. Emails are typically processed in around 10 minutes. As soon as the trade has been processed you will receive a confirmation email from Sharesight containing a link to the newly created trade.

We urge you to try this new feature because the more contract notes we receive the more brokers we will be able to cover and the more comprehensive and reliable the system will become.

Processing PDF files can be a tricky business so we’ll be fine tuning things as we go along to increase accuracy and reliability. The more contract notes you send us the better the system will become. Please use our community forum to let us know if you run into any issues.

Here’s how to get started

Step 1 – Make a note of the email address for your portfolio

To view the email address for your portfolio, you must enable the broker email import function. To do this, first click the ‘settings’ link and then click the ‘edit settings’ button below the appropriate portfolio. Look for the section titled ‘Broker Email Import’ and click the ‘enable’ button. Once enabled, the email address for your portfolio will be displayed. This is the email address where you will send your PDF contract notes for processing.

Step 2 – Check that we currently support your broker

We maintain an up-to-date list of supported brokers here. If your broker is not on the list, ask us to support your broker by submitting an ‘idea’ to the community forum. If someone else has already suggested that we add your broker, please click the +1 button to add you vote. This will allow us to prioritise support for additional brokers.

Step 3 – Send through your contract notes

Because this feature is new we suggest that you manually forward through your first few contract notes before setting things up with your broker. To do this simply forward your contract note email to the email address generated in Step 1, ensuring that the name of the broker (as per our list of supported brokers) is in the subject line of the email.

You will receive an email confirming whether or not the contract note was successfully processed. Please allow 10 minutes or so for the processing to complete. You can view the current status of your email by clicking on the ‘view contract notes’ button (under Settings » General » Edit Settings).

Once you have confirmed that your contract notes are able to be processed successfully, you can instruct you broker to send a copy of your future contract notes to the email address generated in step 1.